


Smoke & Magic

by butterflydreaming (chrysalisdreams)



Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:41:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalisdreams/pseuds/butterflydreaming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mirror introspection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smoke & Magic

  
You have probably heard the saying that magic is just a trick of smoke and mirrors. Magic isn’t a trick, though it is used to play them a lot of the time. Besides, our family doesn’t include a Smoke, even if -- for longer than you have been alive -- I have been called Mirror.

I am an almost perfect copy of my master, and I’m a good actor. I guess in a way that makes me a liar or a trickster spirit like a tanuki or kitsune. I’m not a tanuki or a kitsune. Sometimes I even feel bad when I have to play my trick.

Like on the handsome big brother. I cough and lie limply in my new master’s soft little bed, looking feverish but not so sick that he will be frightened into carrying me off to a healer. He feeds me soup; there are already better side benefits to mirroring my new master over my past master. In some ways, the big brother bears a slight similarity to Clow-sama. He has kind eyes. Yet I didn’t think of my late master as attractive, not the way this boy is attractive -- maybe because I’m not reflecting him. His name is Oniichan, and he is a total mystery to me.

He doesn’t give me the medicine. He puts it aside. “You shouldn’t take medicine when you’re not sick,” he says while looking right into my eyes.

I am an _almost_ perfect copy.

I am more than outside appearance. When you look into a shining surface, you see your image, and you also see who you are. That is the difference between a reflection and a painting or sculpture. I was something else before I was sealed into a Card -- I can’t tell you what, that would be against the magic contract -- not as great as Dark-sama, Light-sama, Yue-sama or Cerberus-sama but still my own self. The contract didn’t change me any more than you change the mirror when you look into it. It is a contract, not a binding; I wasn’t Clow-sama’s slave any more than I am Sakura-sama’s tool. I put up a bigger fight with the sorcerer -- most of us did -- than with the girl because I didn’t know what life would be like in my new form and role.

Before Clow-sama signed his name on me, he offered me the contract. He let me _choose_. There were rules for me, but there were also rules for him. To tell the truth, I thought it was a trick; I thought that since he had already defeated me and outwitted me that he would destroy me if I didn’t agree.

As his brush lifted from the last stroke of his name, I saw into his heart and knew that I had thought wrongly. To be his reflection, I was given insight into the deepest places of his life spirit. I understood his benevolence, his loneliness, his capriciousness, his cruelty -- there was some -- and his pride. In all my years of service, I never understood his thoughts, but in those first moments, I gathered all the pieces that made his personality. And the first time that he released me from the Card form to be his double, I felt the way that I changed. I was a man with a sense of great power. I was the face that my master wanted to show to the world.

Most of the time, my duties were to endure events and people that he found painfully boring. I made the best of it.

When the time came for my new master, I wasn’t afraid of the transfer of the contract. I made a game of it, as I had been instructed, although the game got a little out of hand and Oniichan got hurt. There was still a habit of Clow in me then; I didn’t think heavily about all the consequences; I forgot that, sometimes, good people do unexpected things.

That’s what I mean about feeling bad when I play my tricks.

When the girl child wrote the letters of her name onto me, signing the contract between Card and Master, the currents of yin and yang swirled within me. That was the moment when I truly lost Clow-sama to his mortal death…

…but how could I feel grief when I became Sakura-sama’s mirror? Stronger even than her innocence and sympathy was the pure trust, flowing over me, that “Everything will be all right”. Being Sakura-sama’s reflection is easy because she shows the world all that she is with a rare ingenuousness. Maybe because she is still so young, she has no conscious awareness of how powerful she is, both magically and non-magically.

It is when I am my new master’s reflection that I am most like her in personality, too. I can’t help acting shy and girlish. I _feel_ nine years old. I am the size and shape of a child, and everyone -- even Oniichan, to a degree -- acts toward me based on what they see. Appearance is so important to humans! I think that, more than his pleasant looks and kindness, I like the way Oniichan sees more than the surface appearance of things. I think he doesn’t always know what he is seeing, like the way he thought I was a ghost, yet he treats us supernaturals with respect when he sees us.

When I am in my Card form, I am myself and only a reflection of myself, my history, and my memories. I remember Clow-sama’s kindness. I have lost the sense of him, but I have not forgotten him. He chose this new master for me, for all of us Cards. I knew him, and I know that he chose out of love. Though prideful and sometimes seemingly inconsiderate, love was a thing of great importance to him. Love, and good humor.

Two things that will always reflect back to you.

Kind of like my new master’s face, which at the moment is my face too, shining back at me from the concerned, sensible, worried, dark and deep eyes of my new master’s big brother.

Did I mention that he’s **really** cute?

o-O-o

**Author's Note:**

> Another challenge fic.  
> Topic: Theoretical


End file.
